The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) and, more specifically, but not exclusively, to methods and systems of evaluating suspicious regions in an ultrasonic image of homogeneous or inhomogeneous tissue, such as the breast tissue.
Sonography is widely used for cancer diagnosis, for breast cancer. Worldwide, breast cancer comprises just under 30% of all diagnosed cancers in women. Mammography is currently the most common modality for screening and detecting breast cancer; however, a large portion of the breast lesions found in mammograms is benign. In order to improve the specificity, doctors often examine the suspicious lesions using ultrasound (US) imaging. Nevertheless, even when using both mammography and US, about 80% of the biopsies turn out to be benign.
During the last years, a number of cancer diagnostic tools have been developed, see Nover, A. B., Jagtap, S., Anjum, W., Yegingil, H., Shih, W., Shih, W., Brooks, A. D.: Modern Breast Cancer Detection: A Technological Review. International Journal of Biomedical Imaging (2009) and Sehgal, C. M., Weinstein, S. P., Arger, P. H., Conant, E. F.: A Review of Breast Ultrasound. Journal of Mammary Gland Biology and Neoplasia 11(2) (2006) 113-123.
Some of the cancer diagnostic tools include computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. These systems typically compute a variety of breast image features to distinguish between malignant and benign tumors. The breast image features includes a shape of a suspicious region in the image (estimated as depicting a possible tumor), a texture of the suspicious region, and acoustic properties of the suspicious region.